Huckabee, an Eye on 2016, Sees ‘a Real Opportunity’

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas has not been among the Republicans frequently named as a potential 2016 presidential candidate, but he would like that to change.

“I’m keeping the door open,” Mr. Huckabee said in an interview here this week about the possibility of seeking his party’s nomination again. “I think right now the focus needs to be on 2014, but I’m mindful of the fact that there’s a real opportunity for me.”

Mr. Huckabee, a Christian conservative who made a splash by winning the 2008 Iowa caucuses before seeing his cash-short bid overwhelmed in subsequent states, said he would not run again unless he could finance a durable campaign.

“If I talk to people and they say, ‘If you run, we’re in and we’re in in a big way,’ that’s going be helpful,” he said. “If I don’t hear that, you know what? This will be a real easy decision for me to make because I’ve jumped in a pool without water before and it’s a hard hit at the bottom.”

While he is a strict conservative on social issues, Mr. Huckabee, 58, has been criticized by fiscal conservative organizations over his economic record. The former governor remains contemptuous of such groups as the Club for Growth, which puts him in his party’s pragmatist camp in potential primary challenges to Republican incumbents next year.

“Does the Republican Party want to win elections or do they want to fight each other in a purity war?” he asked.

For its part, the Club for Growth on Friday wasted little time in reviving longstanding criticisms of Mr. Huckabee.

Since Mr. Huckabee dropped out of the 2008 race, the minister-turned governor has made a living off his Fox News show, as well as a talk radio program he just gave up and a steady schedule of paid speeches around the country. He said he did not run for president in 2012 because he did not think President Obama could be defeated, but he also acknowledged he has enjoyed earning a measure of financial comfort and celebrity through his television show.

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Mike Huckabee in Nashville in November. On Friday, he spoke of a potential presidential run.CreditTerry Wyatt/Getty Images

He said it is those factors, along with the rise of “super PACs” that let a single wealthy individual sustain a candidate who lacks a major financial network, that made him look closely at another presidential run.

But he also suggested that one of the reasons he granted an interview about his political future is that he is still bothered about how his first presidential run ended — and he wants the respect he said he believes is due to somebody who performed better than more vaunted candidates and who remains popular with many conservatives.

“Let me show you some polling,” Mr. Huckabee said, brandishing a two-page memo about a survey his longtime pollster took this month suggesting that he was leading the Republican field in both Iowa and South Carolina. He boasted that such good numbers came at a time when “nobody has even talked about me being named” as a candidate.

Mr. Huckabee dismissed the notion that pride was a factor in his decision to float a possible campaign.

“Anybody who would run for any reason other than to win is an idiot,” he said. But he quickly warmed to a question about not getting credit for his skepticism about the health of the economy as he campaigned in the months before the 2008 stock market crash and financial meltdown.

“A lot of things I said that I was sneered at about turned out to be prophetic,” he said about the criticism he took from fellow Republicans over his focus on the working class during the 2008 campaign. “A year later I looked like a genius, but nobody ever said, ‘Huckabee was right,’ ” he said.

He seems intent on running only if he knows the experience will be unlike his last run, when he “was defined by my opponents,” he said. In that race, he had so little money to live on that he had to leave the campaign to give paid speeches.

Asked if he was financially comfortable enough now to give up his lucrative television job, Mr. Huckabee, who lives in a beachfront home on the Florida Gulf Coast, conceded that this was “a big issue.”

“And it’s why I’m not in a big hurry to do anything,” he added.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Huckabee, an Eye on 2016, Sees ‘a Real Opportunity’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe